2013Q1 Reports: Office

Pat Kirby continues to work for us on an as-needed basis throughout the year. It seems to be working well with her working primarily at conference times (almost full-time when she would be needed most) and at other high-volume times. When (or if) our current arrangement is no longer working, I will search for a more permanent arrangement with someone else but, with the ebb and flow of office work requiring more than one person, finding someone who is flexible is difficult.

I have issued the 1099s and am working with Graeme and the accountant to finalize our 2012 IRS tax filing requirements. And, Kevin Knight and I collected, reviewed and made awards to five new ACL Fellows this year.

Otherwise, the office is chugging along nicely.

Publications and Royalties:

With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I receive few requests for publications in the office. In all of 2012, I filled only 4 orders.

We have received royalties from Curran Associates for the last quarter of 2011 and four quarters of 2012 in the amount of $1,985.33. Copyright Clearance Center also sent a check for $1,266.81 for the period ending December 31, 2012. MIT Press Journals’ royalty year ends March 31, 2013. Their annual statement has not yet been received but it is expected that, similar to last year, if we earn less than $50 in royalties, this small amount will be credited to our account for next year.

Membership:

We surpassed 2100 members in 2009 and 2010 and in 2011 and 2012 have reached over 2000 members. I was surprised to see the China membership fall off to 94 in 2012, after having been at a high of 348 at the end of 2010 and 311 at the end of 2011. It seems the extra efforts put forth to focus on bringing China’s membership up from the 65 represented in 2009 worked but a sustained effort of some sort needs to continue if we are to keep them as active members. Please see Membership spreadsheets for the full 2012 calendar year details on countries represented and statistics.

The new Membership Portal is cooperating with my needs. The problem continues, though, that a lot of members are not updating and correcting their information in the Portal and many seem to have never visited their record at all. Pat and I are doing our best to keep the membership information updated and as correct as we can. It is unfortunate that membership records are not being properly updated by the members themselves as was originally envisioned, especially since I often cannot trust the mailing address and must go to people’s websites to find updated information.

We abandoned the experiment of sending out postcards this year and the elections seemed to go very smoothly. The Office had very, very few bounced emails and no complaints of not being allowed to vote due to lapsed membership status. I think setting a membership cut-off date for those who would be eligible to vote worked well.

Conferences:

EACL 2012, in Avignon, was a success with registrations totaling 362.

The office also provided advice and support to Barbara Di Eugenio who organized the INLG 2012 in Utica which had 41 registrants.

While paper submissions were down for NAACL HLT 2012 in Montreal, our final body count of attendees was 705 at part or all of the meeting. Of these, 468 were paying main conference attendees. Another 52 were volunteers, SRW students, sponsors, exhibitors, and guests/organizers. There were also 181 people only attending tutorials, the *SEM co-located conference, or workshops. This was the first ACL-related conference that had close to 40% of the total attendees *not* attending the main conference. If it becomes a trend of some conferences becoming dominated by workshops and co-located conferences, the increased registration fees we currently charge for workshops without main conference are more than justified. Workshops are becoming more and more mini-conferences, complete with poster sessions (13 workshop and *SEM poster sessions took place during the two workshop days in Montreal). It seems everyone enjoyed the conference quite a lot. And, given it was my first time as Local Arrangements Chair, I found it more satisfying and more challenging but, overall, very good to feel truly a part of the conference team.

ACL 2012, held in Jeju, South Korea, had 931 total attendees. Of these, 173 attended only workshops or SIGdial or EMNLP/CoNLL and 13 are complimentary or sponsors. Another 33 are volunteers or SRW student attendees and 14 are staff (mostly Korean local organizers). Overall, the conference went very smoothly, in good part due to the extraordinary efforts of Gary Geunbae Lee and the PCO he selected.

The Office provided advice, online registration system and support to the SIGdial 2012 organizers in Seoul and to the co-located EMNLP/CoNLL 2012 conference in Jeju as well as an advance to SIGdial. SIGdial numbered 79 registrants and EMNLP/CoNLL had 335 registrants plus one invited speaker. Both were quite successful.

ACL 2013 will be in Sofia, Bulgaria. Graeme has signed the venue contract with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), where Svetla Koeva will be our Local Arrangements Chair, and also signed the contract with the AIM Group who will serve as the local PCO. Graeme and I made a second site visit in January where we met with the AIM Group, revisited the conference venue and other places and were happy to see that our suggestions and plans are being followed up. It is possible that Hinrich Schuetze and I may make a visit in April so he can be assured of what is envisioned to make this an interesting and exciting conference.

NAACL HLT 2013 will be held in Atlanta, GA, at the Westin Peachtree, June 9-14. Lucy Vanderwende and others of the organizing committee and I have been working closely on the various planning stages for both NAACL HLT and *SEM which will co-locate in Atlanta. And, the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) has been definitely decided to be in Atlanta the week immediately following NAACL (June 15-21). I hope that there can be some cross-event planning to take advantage of this positive co-location.

Conference Sponsorship:

ACL 2012 had sponsorships totaling $38,646.76 to the Office plus approximately $65,890 USD equivalent in sponsorships directly to/in Korea; EACL 2012 received sponsorships totaling € 5,372.88 through the Office; and, NAACL 2012 received sponsorships totaling $30,304.84 plus $1,800 as a portion of the NSF SRW grant. Baidu committed to being a Platinum Level sponsor, with certain concessions, for ACL 2012. Nuance was a Platinum Sponsor for NAACL 2012, and Google was 3-Pack Gold Sponsor for ACL, EACL and NAACL this year. Elsevier was a new sponsor, supporting ACL 2012 at the Gold level. IBM made a generous contribution of $2,500 toward the NAACL Student Lunch in addition to their “standard” IBM Best Student Paper awards at both ACL and NAACL. And, Microsoft continues to be generous in supporting ACL and NAACL. I am also pleased to report that this year, we had more 3-pack sponsorships (for a somewhat reduced rate, they support all three events) than ever before with 5 companies opting for 3-packs and two other companies supported two of the three conferences. Baidu, Google, Microsoft, IBM and AT&T, among others, also provided support to SIGdial (well over $7,000) and EMNLP/CoNLL ($11,750).

So far we have commitments to ACL 2013 in the amount of $22,254, primarily from Baidu at the Platinum Level and Google as a 2-Pack Gold sponsor plus additional support dedicated to student travel from disadvantaged countries. NAACL 2013 has sponsorship commitments of $8,586 to date as well as $500 in support of the BEA Workshop. IBM continues to support the IBM Best Student Paper awards at both ACL and NAACL and, in addition, will provide $2,500 toward defraying the costs of the Student Lunch at NAACL as they did last year. I am in discussions with Microsoft, Nuance and the Qatar Computing Research Institute as well as others for larger donations to either or both conferences.

The new plan of appointing a Sponsorship Committee with two representatives from each regional world area (Asia, North/South America and Europe/Africa) and having an overall Chair is working very well. It is usually quite difficult to get sponsorships from world areas not hosting a conference, so expectations of support from Asia for 2013 are not high.

The area Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them. And, many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!